My mother fell today. She got hurt but not badly, and it got
me thinking. She’s seventy-two now.
It wasn’t a doddering-old-lady accident. She just tripped. I
do that all the time. We Lawrences are a graceful bunch. All the same, I couldn’t
quite put it out of my head. This is where we are now. As an only child, I have
always known that the day would come when the balance of our relationship would
shift and I would become the caregiver. There is still a bit of a shock when
you find that long-anticipated day has arrived. My mind went automatically to
whether she needed a doctor, how to get the kids home from school, whether my
father needed me to be there, and on and on. This is a woman who used to run a
department of a major corporation with such laser focus that I swear she only
came home to sleep. She got a PhD at fifty because she just wanted to. She learned Italian in her sixties. She knows exactly which lines were cut from that Shakespearean production and can recite them on demand.
My father, whose mind has always been brilliant and whose
composure has always been coma-like, is seventy-six. He’s started to forget
things. He’s started to make mistakes. It’s disorienting to see such a
razor-sharp intellect lose the edge my mother and I always relied upon. It’s a
bit sad it happened gradually enough for me to become accustomed to having to
double-check with him. I couldn’t even tell you when “reminding Dad” became
standard operating procedure. The change snuck up on me like a ninja. We’re
talking about a man who wrote out the grocery list in order of where the items
were located in the aisles. From memory. In pen.
It shouldn’t have surprised me. I’m forty-two. But frankly,
it’s still way too early to start talking about my parents’ twilight years.
People in my family tend to hang around quite awhile. It may be another twenty
years before we’re really talking about “The End.” However, my parents are no
longer comfortably nestled in that catchall period known as middle age. The
scares will become more frequent, the list of doctors and specialists will
become longer, and my separateness from them will shrink.
Shorty is turning eleven this week. Seven more years until
society labels him a legal adult. My time as the parent of actual children is coming to an end, but I will
continue to be a caretaker. If family patterns hold, I will only stop when my
parents have gone, and it becomes my boys’ turn to worry about my aging body
and how much longer they can cling to their independence before the
separateness from me is no longer possible. I’d hoped that by having two
children, neither would have to shoulder that alone. It may not work out that
way, but at least I gave it a shot.
My teen is fast approaching his seventeenth birthday, and
our recent conversations have revolved around driver’s ed, college searches,
and potential careers. Never have the sands fallen so quickly through the
hourglass. I’m nearly out of time, I think. Now I frantically bombard him with
all the life lessons and tools I hadn’t gotten around to yet. I’m cramming for
the exam, although he will be the one tested. I hope that if I forgot an
assignment, he will call me and ask for my notes. I try to trust that he’s ready,
and I remind myself to let him fail.
My husband and I have begun to realize we need things to
talk about outside the kids and our careers. We need to remember how to hang
out. How to just sit and shoot the shit for hours about all sorts of nonsense,
like we used to back when we were young and had all the time in the world.
This is why people have mid-life crises, I think. I’ve
always been aware that time was passing, but never before has such a sense of
urgency been tied to it. The next steps along the path are all big ones, but
none of them are mine. This gives me a sense of powerlessness that I am having
trouble adjusting to, even though I know that control has always been an
illusion. My life now has a different flavor, and my mind is reacting the same
way the world did when New Coke was introduced in the 1980s, with a loud cry of
“What the hell is this nonsense?”
Time is passing, and there are no guarantees. So I sit and
wonder, in the midst of scheduling SAT prep classes and learning about
end-of-life care options, what about me? Am I content to just bounce back and
forth from daughter to mother to daughter to mother to (perhaps) grandmother?
What about my writing? You can prepare for some eventualities. Get life
insurance so your family can pay your final expenses. Get health insurance so
the life insurance won’t be needed prematurely. Get auto and home insurance so
your assets stay around as long as you do. But there isn’t an insurance company
out there than can protect against untapped potential.
I’m weirdly comforted by that. It doesn’t give me the sense
of anxiety that other things do. It’s nice to know that there are some things
that will only exist if I create them. There’s a footprint only I can leave
behind. This is an excellent reminder to me that the things I love best, beyond
the family and friends I cherish, need me to give them life. My writing is
mine, and it is me—independent of my health, my appearance, my social skills,
my number of friends, even my self-esteem. It is mine in the purest sense
possible.
Somewhere in between being a daughter and a mother, a wife
and a friend, I am a writer. I will be a writer the next time my mother falls
and the next time my father forgets. I will be a writer while my children take
their first steps into their own slice of the world to learn who they will
become. I will be a writer when my husband and I are left to our own devices,
when we suddenly notice that we’re still seeing each other as twenty-three and
so clueless, even though the world around us calls us “Ma’am” and “Sir” and our
children have started worrying about our falls and forgetfulness. I am so, so
fortunate to have this gift I can carry with me always, and now I am taking the
time to remember that what I have to share with the world is just as important
as my other roles.
November is National Novel Writing Month, and (shocking, I
know) many of my friends are writers. I have heard nearly every one of them in
the past ten days question their abilities. The words won’t come, the story is
stupid, the characters are jerks, the world will laugh (or worse, ignore) their
paltry offerings. Each of these friends has real talent. No one of them could
write the story any other has written. Their uniqueness is remarkable. The
qualities I see in each of them, the reasons I call these people friends, come
across on the page. I know they can’t see it. I know they are frustrated, maybe
a little scared, feeling foolish for even trying. But they are so, so
brilliant. They have so much wonder and truth and heart that I want to scream
at them, “Can’t you see how totally remarkable you are?” So this is me, yelling
at each of you. Use your time. Create something new. No one else can tell your
story.
